Judging by its announcements last week (CI No 1,288) Unisys Corp is clearly pulling out all the stops to expand and enhance its Unix family to plug the inevitable gaps as its proprietary mainframe and mid-range systems dwindle to a replacement only market, with many customers drifting away by attrition. The company wants its U-series Unix machines to offer the same scale of transaction processing capabilities and applications previously available only on proprietary mainframe architectures and it plans to begin a series of major transaction processing announcements next year. It plans to offer a compatible upgradable line that is scalable from one to 250 transactions per second. And its processors will support personal computers, workstations and character-oriented terminals both via RS232 interfaces and over local networks. It plans ultimately to support distributed transactions via TCP/IP, Open Systems Interconnection protocols, and interaction with proprietary mainframe databases via IBM’s LU6.2, DEC’s DECNet, and OS/2 LAN Manager. It plans that its Unix-based transaction processing should become the delivery vehicles for its key vertical market applications and be integrated with its own application development environments. A standard implementation kit will support implementation of third party applications both to Unisys and non-Unisys Unix systems – a key to the success of its plans for value added resellers and OEM customers. As for the U Series, which if all goes to plan should soon include models based on the Sun Microsystems Sparc RISC microprocessor family, Unisys plans to add high-resiliency characteristics such as data mirroring, automatic deadlock detection and resolution, on-line back-up, transaction rollback and logging, dynamic scheduling and recovery. As for transaction databases, Unisys is highlighting Oracle Corp’s Oracle and Informix Software’s Informix.
